One of my earliest memories was me being caught by my mother at age 3 in the early hours of the morning watching the all night music video channel and eating rice bubble drowning in sugar. Now, 20 something years later I don’t eat rice bubbles but I am still as excited if not more excited about find new tunes as then.
Which is why this week I spent about three hours looking at this.
If you don’t have time to be distracted, here is the 411 (I’ve been wanting to use that for a while now.)
1) Type in an artist
2) Search
3) Tune Glue provide you with a bunch of artists that are connected in a cool social circle style diagram.
4) Click on connected artists, repeat process til you pass out.
5) Curse the fact you have wasted most of the day.
After I did this it got me thinking about how I look for new music and how to get beyond the radio and stuff your friends like. Here are 3 of my more obscure methods to finding new music.
Label hunting or the super secret DJ method.
Most independent artists have a releases across various indie labels. This means that by browsing Artist A’s discography you can find a list of labels. From here you move to the label discography and listen to new artists. The thing with quality indie labels is usually there have a niche market so the type of music you’ll find is often very similar stylistically. From here you repeat process with these new artist and repeat.
The Benefit: Assuming the label is good their filter for music makes most of the stuff you find awesome.
Personally, I’ve found most algorithm based searches don’t work quite as well as this method. Good music seems to come in clustered and jumping from one to another is often more chance and luck then anything else. So this method allows you to go off on half-cocked tangents which sometimes end badly and sometime end in a goldmine.
The Drawback: It’s time consuming and addictive.
Soundtrack Raiding:
Very similar to the first method. Searching soundtracks of movies you like often returns interesting results. It’s a total gold mine for random encounters with great music. When combined with method number one it can lead your taste in a whole new direction.
The Benefit: Unlike the first method it’s a whole lot faster.
Drawback: You’ll hear some stuff that going to make your ears bleed and question the taste of the film maker.
The Radio Promo Swipe:
If you live in a large city chances are there is some sort of community radio station. Firstly get involved. Secondly, your mind will be blown by the amount of promo material that will be sent in weekly. Often this will be sorted and cataloged by the radio station programmer with most of the duplicate then be farmed off to anyone who wants one. This is great way to find new, unsigned and local bands (It’s also give you an excuse to go out and get involved)
The Benefit: Here you can talk with other people into records, find out about upcoming talent, find underground shows and if you want to be playing out it’s a good way to make some friends etc.
Drawback: Sometimes because of time constraints not everything will be listen to, so you’ll take home stuff, put it on and it will be bad. Really, really bad.
Get you hand dirty:
Now I told you about it.
Go do it.
Next week: I’m going to jump back on the music production bandwagon and talk about drum loops and re-programing.
Stay tuned, Subscribe and Share
Braydon
Blind Man Bass 